Norway takes gold in Team Event of extremes
Mar 02, 2019·Nordic Combined
After an extremely high level of jumping and and an extremely tactical cross-country race, Team Norway took their first World Championship gold medal since 2005 in Seefeld today. Espen Bjørnstad, Jan Schmid, Jørgen Graabak and Jarl Riiber crossed the finish line first after beating Germany's Vinzenz Geiger and Austria's Lukas Klapfer in a finish line sprint.
A huge number of spectators saw a fantastic and incredibly exciting jumping event with many long jumps. Local heroes Bernhard Gruber, Mario Seidl, Franz-Josef Rehrl and Lukas Klapfer were one of two teams who only showed jumps over the 100-metre-mark with performances of 105.5, 111.5, 111.5 and 100.5 metres (493.9 p.).
Go Yamamoto, Hideaki Nagai, Akito Watabe and Yoshito Watabe were not far behind with equally fantastic jumps of 102, 105, 110 and 108.5 metres and with a point total of 493, the time difference to the leading Austrian foursome was just one second.
For Team Norway, especially Espen Bjørnstad shone with 108.5 metres in the first round and with Jan Schmid and Jarl Riiber also performing on a high level with jumps of 106 and 107 metres, the team had a good starting position. Together with Jørgen Graabak’s 98 metres, the team came in at 481 points which meant a time behind of 17 seconds that kept them well in the game for the race.
The distance to team Germany was a little bigger, as their four jumps only totalled at 463.4 points. Vinzenz Geiger, Eric Frenzel, Johannes Rydzek and Fabian Rießle started their race 41 seconds behind the leaders from Austria but with four strong skiers, everything was still possible for the title defenders.
Go Yamamoto lost contact to Bernhard Gruber already on the first metres of the race. Gruber stormed around his 5 km leg of the race full throttle and Austria was rewarded with a clear 27.6 second advantage at the first exchange. Norway and Japan were skiing together and even though Johannes Rydzek tried his utmost to close the gap, the 2017 quadruple World Champion did not have his best day on the track today. The German squad was still 25 seconds behind the Norwegian - Japanese duo at the exchange.
On the second leg of the race, Eric Frenzel rectified this and when his 5 km were over, Austria’s lead had melted to 11.5 seconds, Jan Schmid was skiing two seconds behind Frenzel and Yoshito Watabe had dropped back to a 35.7 second gap.
Enter Jørgen Graabak, Fabian Rießle and Franz-Josef Rehrl. What was supposed to be the third leg of the race looked like the final one as none of the three wanted to exhaust himself on the difficult track and undertake the leading work. This lead to curious scenes like Rehrl making contact and cracking a laugh with Graabak while stalling before a downhill. In the end, all three teams exchanged to their respective final man together and pursuers Japan, who were hindered by a broken pole for Hideaki Nagai were over one minute behind at the last exchange.
Now the tactical games continued with new actors: Jarl Magnus Riiber, Vinzenz Geiger and Lukas Klapfer skied together and took it easy together as well, so that pursuer Akito Watabe was able to close the gap by over half a minute at the finish line. Even though (next to some easy alpine moves) Lukas Klapfer tried to set smaller attacks in between, Geiger and Riiber were not to be shaken and so Jarl Riiber was able to use his sprinting dominance on the final stretch.
Going into the downhill first and surprising Vinzenz Geiger, who lost the decisive few metres going down the last downhill, Riiber once again crossed the finish line first after an impressive sprint up the final stretch. One second separated Team Germany from the winners in the end. The local heroes from Austria had to be satisfied with the third place, finishing five seconds after the Norwegians. Japan finished fourth, Finland was fifth, France sixth, Italy seventh, Poland eighth, the Czech Republic ninth, the USA tenth, Russia eleventh and Kazakhstan twelfth.
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